


the fire's found a home in me

by hauntedjaeger (saellys)



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Angst, Author Knows Nothing About Nuclear Reactors, Canonical Character Death, Dystopia, Everybody Lives, Except The People Who Died Before The Timeframe Of This Fic, Gen, Jaegers (Pacific Rim), Mortality, Nile Freeman-centric, The Drift (Pacific Rim), Worldbuilding, canon-typical mentions of torture, headcanon dump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-21
Updated: 2020-10-21
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:35:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27135332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saellys/pseuds/hauntedjaeger
Summary: Nile has had it. She’s tired and she’s telegraphing her moves and she’s done caring. There is nothing that matters except beating her. She crowds up to Andy and swings for her face; Andy leans out of range. Nile puts everything she’s got into the backstroke, and Andy raises her stick to block with her hands set wide.It snaps in half.That doesn't count as a point, but damn if it doesn’t feel great anyway.Andy steps back, staring at the two halves. Nile puts the tip of her stick under Andy’s chin.That’sa point.There’s something new and electric in Andy’s eyes. She nods, as if to the beat of a song Nile can’t hear, and tosses the broken pieces away.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Nile Freeman
Comments: 39
Kudos: 82





	the fire's found a home in me

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! This fic is my love letter to my two emotional support movies. It’s dedicated to all my buds from PacRim fandom who are now in TOG fandom too. 
> 
> The main things you need to know going into this AU are: 1. Lykon and Quynh survived and stayed free until the 21st century, and 2. every PacRim character that was alive in the main timeframe of the movie also survived in this universe and lived happily ever after, but you won’t be hearing from them. 
> 
> If you like Ramin Djawadi compositions and Vitamin String Quartet as much as I do, there’s a mini playlist for this fic here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3QeVVTUZizMZQROecLtWab?si=ixG3tj6QTPWp_6gtFodHeQ

Nile Freeman was fifteen when the first kaiju made land in San Francisco. 

She is twenty-seven when she slips off the unfinished Wall of Life and plummets four hundred feet to the frozen ground. 

The fall lasts long enough for her to reflect on the way she set her foot too far forward on the steel crossbeam, without taking into account the fifty pounds of welding gear on her back. Long enough to realize she’ll never see her mom and brother again. The wind freezes her tears to her cheeks and robs her breath when she tries to scream. She has the presence of mind to tuck her legs, but that won’t save her. She dies on impact, before she can feel any pain. 

Guys fall off the Wall every day. Their ruined gear gets taken off the site inventory and their ration cards get redistributed and that’s the end. 

Only, it’s not the end for Nile. 

She wakes gasping in a hospital room. She can’t move. Through mounting panic, she strains to raise her head and look down at herself. Her arms and legs are splinted in black velcro and rigid frames. 

Beneath her right hand is a nurse call button. She pushes and pushes it until they come in. “Please,” she begs--but for what, she doesn’t know. “Please.”

One of them prepares a sedative, but the other sees Nile’s fingers clenching and opening, and she undoes the velcro restraining Nile’s right arm. The panic attack is full gale now. Nile grabs the railing on the side of her bed. 

The nurse pries her fingers off the metal and holds Nile’s hand--God bless her--while the other one sets down the syringe and frees her left arm, then her legs, which Nile folds up and clutches. After a minute she realizes the first nurse is discreetly checking the bones in her hand, while the second has backed away, staring, from her bedside. 

She is whole, impossibly. Once she rides out the panic, they send her for x-rays. She lies under the camera and lets the technicians pose her like a doll, and every time the machine clicks she recalls another image she saw when she was… dead? Unconscious?

Bodies moving in tandem. A silver flask, spiking a cup of something hot. Two men roused from their bunk by a flashing light. A woman with piercing eyes. Lightning and flame at the bottom of the sea. 

When she returns to her room, she has visitors. “Hey, look who’s up!”

“What’s up, Jay? What’s up, Dizzy?” She can’t muster a lot of enthusiasm. 

“Fuck me,” Dizzy breathes, watching Nile walk to her bed. Dizzy has two bags over her shoulder, and after a minute Nile realizes they’re hers. 

“You were a puddle of guts when they found you,” says Jay, wonderingly. 

“Yeah.” Nile swallows, reaching for an explanation and finding none. “Yeah. What’s going on?” She nods toward the bags. Dizzy drops them to the floor and steps away from them. 

“Word came down through the foreman,” Jay tells her. “You got reassigned.” 

“Reassigned?” Nile echoes. She doubts the foreman even knew her name. Her only assignment was her place on the wall, and that depended on which ration card she was able to claim each day. 

“Someone was asking for you up in brass. Just in time, too.” Nile’s confusion must show on her face, because Dizzy reaches up and turns on the TV. 

In Sydney, a Category IV kaiju has breached the Coastal Wall. 

Nile watches Mutavore rip through steel and concrete like it’s tissue paper. Strange to think she is somehow more resilient than the wall she has worked on for years. 

“Why the hell are we even building that thing?” Dizzy mutters. But none of them were on the Wall because they believed they were making a difference. Rations are rations. 

The reporter talks breathlessly about Spearhead Rocinante, formerly assigned to the Sydney Shatterdome that was decommissioned just that morning. Nile turns her hands over and over, looking for any sign of what happened to her. 

She jolts when Jay smacks her shoulder. “Watch this part.”

The news report is mostly phone footage. There are always people in Rim cities foolish enough to stand on rooftops during a kaiju rampage, like midwesterners staying outside to spot tornadoes. 

Spearhead is a Mark-3, broad shouldered and top heavy, her hull anodized navy blue. She goes right up to Mutavore and headbutts its ugly face. Jay grins. She had aspirations of joining the Jaeger program, until they shut down the Academy. 

Nile lets her eyes wander as Spearhead downs the kaiju with her plasma cannon, and the footage cuts to the reporter trying to follow the pilots through a line of Pan Pacific Defense Corps strike troopers. “How come the Jaeger’s name is Spanish?” Dizzy asks. “I thought one of the pilots was French.”

“It’s from _Don Quixote_ ,” Nile says absently. 

“And _One Piece_ ,” says Jay. 

For a second, as a laugh bubbles up her throat, it feels like they’re back in the work site canteen after a shift, drinking ration beer and talking about the stupidest shit. But then Jay and Dizzy tear their eyes away from the the TV to look at her, Jay with fascination and Dizzy with distrust. 

“We’ll let you get some sleep,” Dizzy says. 

Jay follows her out the door. “Call me when you get where you’re going.” 

Nile has slept enough. Her clothes were ruined in the fall, so she gets dressed from the bag Dizzy packed--a faded sweater and pants that fit her in the days when rations had more carbs. They found her a pair of boots and a ragged jacket, too. Nile sits on the bed again and runs her thumb over her cross necklace. 

She’s still there when a pair of strike troopers find her. “Ms. Freeman,” says one, “would you come with us, please?”

Since she doesn’t have a choice, she doesn’t answer. Just grabs her bags and follows them out. The nurses watch and they don’t protest. Everyone, it seems, is glad to see the back of her. 

They take her up to the helipad. The chopper parked there isn’t a medevac, but one of the big ones, a Chinook. Two more strike troopers wait beside it. They file in behind Nile, and when she’s buckled, one of them hands her a tablet. Nile boots it up to find dozens of documents. They all have the PPDC eagle watermarked on the cover page. 

They are, she realizes after skimming a few, the kind of material that might have made up the curriculum at the Jaeger academy. 

Cognitive architecture, trauma resilience, Drift compatibility. “Your Jaeger And You: A Ranger’s Guide To Conn-Pod Maintenance.” Tables for calculating neural load based on tonnage of moving parts. Schematics of the Pons unit that facilitates the Drift between pilots. A map of the last active Shatterdome, in Hong Kong. Guidelines for talking to the press, which boil down to “don’t”. A long non-disclosure agreement to drive it home--here, the tablet scans her thumbprint in place of a signature. 

And she still has no idea what it’s all for. 

The chopper flies southwest, over open ocean. Nile sets the tablet aside and digs the heel of her hand between her eyebrows where a headache is brewing. When she closes her eyes, she sees Dizzy’s face, the start of a sneer on her lips. 

Nile will never be able to go back to drinking with her in the canteen. 

She takes deep, slow breaths through her nose, and fishes her phone and earbuds out of her bag. No service this far out to sea, so she’ll have to wait until they land before she can hear her mom’s voice again. At least she has her music. The first notes of “Godspeed” ease the tension in her shoulders and take her out of herself a little. 

The Jaeger Academy closed to new applicants in late 2020; it shut down entirely in 2021. By then, too many Jaeger pilots had died, and the Pacific Perimeter Project was underway. And there was something about the last round of pilots, something that made the Corps dial down to three Jaegers, and then two. 

Nile has no relevant experience for J-Tech. There were better jobs in the Corps than hers, and worse ones too. Just as she never got to set foot in the Icebox or the Kodiak production plant, she also never had to work security in the radioactive charnel house of Oblivion Bay. She’s never even seen a Jaeger up close. 

What do they want with her?

She dozes off with the question still in her mind. She dreams of an eclipsed sun like an eye, of vertebrae and teeth in jagged rows, of swarming shapes like blood cells, of pain searing through her limbs. 

When she jerks awake, raindrops pelt the chopper. They’re approaching land, but the rain shrouds everything beyond the massive structure with six hangar doors in the bay. 

A figure waits on the helipad beneath an umbrella. Nile steps out the chopper and accepts the spare he offers. “Ms. Freeman, I’m James Copley.” Nile shakes his hand. “I’m sorry I couldn’t meet you in Sitka--mountains of paperwork. I hope the reading material helped get you up to speed.”

Nile glances around them at the landing area, the techs hauling gear. “How did you find me?”

Copley turns away to lead her into the building. “The PPDC tracks hospital admissions. I’m notified anytime there’s an abnormality like yours.”

How many times has this happened? Do they really classify falling four hundred feet and surviving as “abnormal”? Clearly Copley is the kind of guy who doesn’t give direct answers if he can help it, and that’s on Nile for asking _how_ instead of _why_. 

But before she can rectify that, someone calls for them to hold the elevator. A woman follows them in, shaking rain from her parka. She sets down a high-impact case labeled _Samples - S. Rocinante_. Copley says, “This is Doctor Kozak, our head of research.”

The woman pulls her hood back. Her blonde hair is in a tidy bun, and her dark eyes fix on Nile with unsettling intentness. “Ms. Freeman,” she says. Nile can’t place her accent. “We’re so glad you’re here.”

“Thanks,” Nile says, fighting the urge to step back. 

“Dr. Kozak studies the physiological effects of Drift technology,” says Copley. “She’s at the top of her field.”

“I am the field,” Kozak says with half a smile and zero humility. 

“And this is our floor.”

“Ms. Freeman, I’ll see you at 0600 for your physical.” Kozak keeps watching Nile until the elevator door slides shut. 

There was some dense stuff on the tablet about the atomic nature of the Breach, the increasing frequency of attacks, and speculation on why the kaiju are silicon-based lifeforms. There was nothing at all with Kozak’s name in the byline. “Is she the whole research division?” Nile asks Copley. 

Copley gives her a carefully bland smile. “Kozak is here at the request of our funding source. They have a vested interest not only in the war effort, but in the continued wellbeing of our pilots.” He scans a keycard at a panel, and the massive steel doors before them open. “Welcome to the Shatterdome.”

It’s a cathedral. The vaulted ceiling rises nearly as high as the Wall. Nile gawks shamelessly, turning a circle. Over the door she just came through, an analog clock counts the seconds. It’s been fourteen hours since the last nonsense. 

Titanium giants stand at attention in two of the six bays. Spearhead Rocinante’s hull is open for reactor access; the J-Techs look like ants beside her. In the opposite bay, Scion Heliac gleams with seawater, just back from patrol. 

Nile tears her eyes away in time to almost get run over by a munitions cart. She waves the driver off sheepishly, and proceeds to where Copley waits for her. “Are you hungry?” he asks. “The others will be in the mess hall.”

“Others?” Nile says, but then they turn into a side corridor, and the smell hits her. Holy shit. “Is that _bread_?”

“Perks of an open port,” says Copley. 

She hasn’t seen bread in years. She follows Copley into the mess hall, its long tables filled with J-Techs in between their shifts. Feels a lot like the canteen in Sitka, but it smells better for a variety of reasons. 

“Ah,” says Copley. He stops by the stairs where a man in a leather jacket descends with two trays. “Ms. Freeman, this is Yusuf al-Kaysani, one of the pilots of Scion Heliac.”

“It’s Joe, please.” Joe doesn’t have a hand free, so he pushes a tray at her, loaded with bread and pasta and potatoes. If she ever has a Jaeger, she’s going to name it Glorious Carbs. “Come sit at our table, Ranger Freeman.” 

“Oh, no, I’m--” She looks to Copley, but he nods and turns to go. 

Joe tilts his head at her; Nile recognizes him then, from the dream. That was real. _They_ were real. He says, “Come on. We saved you a spot.”

Nile follows him. The others sit at the farthest end of one row of tables. Joe gestures to each of them. “Nile, this is Andy, Booker, and Nicky.”

Andy, Booker, and Nicky look up from their food and consider Nile. Andy and Booker have Spearhead’s horseman insignia on their jackets, and a bottle of PPDC branded vodka on the table between them. Nicky’s jacket matches Joe’s with a stylized sun and moon. 

Nile takes the seat Joe leaves open at his right. “They found you fast,” says Andy. It’s impossible to tell, from her flat tone and stony face, whether she’s pleased about that. 

“It used to take years to track a new one,” Nicky adds. “Booker was the last--1812.”

Nile has a mouthful of pasta, and she promptly chokes on it. When she recovers she leans forward to see past Joe. Booker nods confirmation. “So you’re even older,” she says to the others. 

“Nicky and I met in the Crusades,” Joe says with his mouth full. 

“The Cr--” Nile hushes, mindful of the techs sitting at the same table, but none of them seem to care. She stares at Nicky, who smiles a little, and then at Andy. 

Andy stares back, daring her to ask. 

Maybe they don’t know each other well enough for that yet. Nile picks at her potatoes. “So why is this happening to me?” 

“It’s because you can’t die,” Andy says. 

They really do just say this stuff out loud. And Nile has been trying not to think about--that. She shakes her head, keeps her eyes down. “I’m not… experienced. I didn’t even go to the Academy.”

“Experience will come,” Nicky assures her. “You’ll be throwing us all on the mat before long.” 

“They don’t make fighters at construction sites,” Andy says into her glass. 

She probably can’t help sounding so dismissive, but it pisses Nile off anyway. Anyone can do a headbutt--they’re not special. “I can fight just fine,” she says, and the edge in her voice raises the others’ brows. 

Andy takes a long drink of vodka, never breaking eye contact as she swallows. “You fell off the Wall, right?” 

Nile lifts her chin. “That’s right.”

Booker refills Andy’s glass. “I slipped off a yardarm once,” he says. “Hit every spar on my way down. I don’t think I had any unbroken vertebrae by the time I ended up in the water.” 

“We keep track of most stupid deaths,” Joe tells Nile. “You’re starting strong.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Been a few of them in the last four years,” says Booker. “We might go longer in between if we used more of what they taught in the Academy.”

Joe smiles. “But then the good doctor would be so disappointed.”

“The creepy white lady?” Nile says. 

“You’ve met her!”

“You’ll get used to the weekly blood draws,” says Nicky. 

“And the post-drop scans,” Joe adds. 

Booker says, “And all our Pons data is stored and analyzed.” 

Nile steals a look around the mess hall. There aren’t any strike troopers here, at least not in uniform, but she still feels the oppressive echo of their presence. “What if I don’t want this?” She struggles to keep her voice down. “Do any of you get to check out?” 

They trade an unreadable glance. 

“This is the only fight that matters now,” Andy says, and her voice carries the weight of that decision for all of them. 

“So you chose this,” Nile says. At some point, at least, they _had_ a choice. 

“Who doesn’t want to get in a Jaeger?” Joe says cheerfully. 

Nile shoves her bread around in the pasta sauce. “Thank God there are just two of them,” she mutters.

Andy says, “No room for cowards.” 

Nile puts down her bread and clenches her jaw. Some invisible line is drawn tight through all of them. 

Finally Nicky reaches into his jacket and pulls out a wad of actual cash. “Five hundred,” he says, setting it on the table. “On Nile.” 

“No,” Andy says, but there’s something almost playful in her voice now. 

Booker looks from her to Nile, eyes cautious. “All right,” he says. “All in, here it is.” 

“All in,” Joe echoes, delighted. 

This is some bullshit. She doesn’t fight for anyone else’s entertainment. But the cash sings her a soft siren song--it would be a good start toward getting the hell away from here. “I get a cut of that,” she says to Nicky. 

“Certamente,” he replies. 

She gazes coolly at Andy. “Which way to the parking lot?”

They do not, it turns out, throw down in the parking lot. The ‘Dome has its own special room just for throwing down, and it’s there that Joe (still openly overjoyed at the way this evening is going) presents Nile with a plain wooden stick. Then he hauls ass off the mat. 

Nile gets her boots and sweater off. When she’s down to a tank and pants, she picks up the stick again. She played softball in high school; she had loads of plastic lightsaber fights with her little brother, who always insisted on being Finn. It’s totally the same principle. 

The Academy documentation described sparring as a _method of gauging and developing physical compatibility as the basis for Drift compatibility_. But this, it’s clear as Andy takes off her jacket and gives her stick a fluid little spin, is going to be a _fight_. 

“You really want to do this, kid?” 

Nile finds that she really does. It will be good to blow off the tension she’s been holding, and she has something to prove. Just to herself, not these people, and definitely not to Andy. 

In answer, she settles into a wide stance, grip firm on the stick. 

Faster than death, Andy comes at her. Their sticks clack together and it rattles up Nile’s arms. Before she can congratulate herself on blocking the strike, Andy steps past their locked staffs, turning at Nile’s right. 

She moves like she’s a river and Nile is a rock. The stick sweeps after her and lands at the small of Nile’s back. 

Nile doesn’t stumble, but she does grunt. She jabs her stick behind her without looking, and Andy whacks the tip harmlessly away. Nile turns with it to track her. On the sideline, Booker is holding up one finger. Nile cuts a broad arc to put Andy on the back foot, then follows and thrusts at her gut. The stick connects. 

Someone whistles low, but Nile isn’t looking away from Andy again. 

There’s no change in Andy’s expression, no tells. She shifts her weight and strikes high, and Nile blocks twice, a third time down low. She’s pulling back to swing herself when Andy finds some impossible gap between one second and the next, and her stick halts a breath from Nile’s face. 

Nile shoves it away. She drives Andy back again, staff swishing. Andy blocks every time, but gives ground. They’re almost to the other end of the mat when she switches her grip to strike underhand, and Nile realizes too late Andy’s been playing with her. She circles Nile now, always just a step out of reach. 

Nile has had it. She’s tired and she’s telegraphing her moves and she’s done caring. There is nothing that matters except beating her. She crowds up to Andy and swings for her face; Andy leans out of range. Nile puts everything she’s got into the backstroke, and Andy raises her stick to block with her hands set wide. 

It snaps in half. 

That doesn't count as a point, but damn if it doesn’t feel great anyway. 

Andy steps back, staring at the two halves. Nile puts the tip of her stick under Andy’s chin. _That’s_ a point. 

There’s something new and electric in Andy’s eyes. She nods, as if to the beat of a song Nile can’t hear, and tosses the broken pieces away. 

Now they’re in Nile’s wheelhouse. She gets rid of her stick and advances on Andy. Nile raises her arm and Andy seizes it, gets behind her somehow, and dumps Nile on her back hard enough to loosen her braids from their bun. 

Nile rolls to one knee, looks up at Andy, lunges shoulder-first. Andy lets the force of it carry her back a few steps, then she turns Nile aside. She reels but doesn’t go down. Andy waits for her to face her again, waits for Nile to throw a punch, dodges it, blocks the next one, and transforms it into a hold that leaves Nile open for a jab to the kidney. 

That _hurts_. Nile staggers and shoots Andy a glare, but she might as well be made of marble for all the effect it has. 

She swings harder the next round, and at the last instant she turns a left hook into a feint, tries to sweep Andy’s foot instead. Andy lifts her leg neatly out of the way and Nile spins with that, coming back around to follow through on her original punch. It lands. 

Nile doesn’t care if anyone’s tracking points anymore. They have passed into some new space, something she can’t define as a fight even though Andy is driving elbows into her ribs and thigh, even though she is still finding all of Nile’s weak spots and living there. 

If there were more people in this fight, they would never get at Nile. Andy is there, so no one else can use those weaknesses against her. 

Andy is a guided missile locked on Nile’s center of gravity, so Nile can work at the margins of her. 

Nile turns, so Andy turns with her, holding her no closer or farther than the length of one black-wrapped arm. 

Nile slams her heel down where the top of Andy’s foot should be, and it isn’t there anymore, and when she meets no resistance they both adjust like they’re one body. 

Nile throws a wide punch and Andy catches it, hooks one leg over Nile’s arm and pivots with a hand on the floor and her other leg against Nile’s knee. She twists until Nile lands face down, her arm pinned decisively under Andy’s leg in a position that is a hair away from snapping the bone. 

She isn’t even mad about it. 

Andy rolls away and back to her feet. “You’re very good,” she says, and maybe it’s the circulation returning to her arm, but Nile feels the words like a warm glow. 

“Grazie mille, Nicky,” says Booker, somewhere far away. “Never bet against a man’s copilot.”

“Prego, prego, prego.” Nicky doesn’t sound mad either. 

Andy reaches down, and Nile takes her hand. She hoists her up and they stay there for another breath as something passes silently between them. Andy doesn’t smile--hasn’t smiled yet--but Nile can see she won’t go calling her a coward again. Maybe not _kid_ , either. 

Nile ties her boots back on and watches the dark bruises fade from her forearms. The others are clearing out; Nicky carries her bags. Nile catches up and there is no “Nice job,” no chatter at all, just Booker moving to the side to let Nile into their midst. She falls into step with them. 

Joe and Nicky’s quarters are close by. Like all the other rooms they’ve passed, it has a massive steel door with a handwheel in the center, and no lock that Nile can see. 

Inside, two swords are mounted to the industrial concrete wall above a shelf full of paperbacks and sketchbooks. A long softshell case leans in the corner, near the door to a latrine. The desk has been converted to a kitchenette with pots stacked neatly beside a hot plate. Against the far wall is a double bunk with drawers underneath, and a folding cot occupies the remaining open space. A lot of life crammed into a hundred square feet. 

Nicky sets Nile’s bags down just inside the door. “You’re welcome to sleep here,” Joe offers. “We’ll get another cot.”

“I have a room,” Nile says quickly. It is, according to the map on the tablet, just across the corridor. 

Joe shrugs. He gets on the lower bunk while Andy climbs up top. Booker sits on the cot. Nicky puts a kettle on the hot plate, and nods for Nile to take the desk chair. When he offers Booker a cup of tea, Booker spikes it from his flask. A sense of deja vu overwhelms Nile. “How are you all in my dreams?” she asks. 

“We dream of each other,” says Joe. “They stop when we meet.”

Before Joe can answer, Nicky says, “I believe it’s because we were meant to find each other. It’s like destiny.” He pushes a cup into Nile’s hands. It’s a green tea blend; she smells ginseng and mint. 

“No, more like misery loves company,” Booker says, drawing a smile from Joe. 

Nile glances up at Andy, who says, “What he said.”

“How long have you been doing this?”

“We started on Kaiju Blue cleanup after Cabo,” Joe says. “Didn’t go into the Corps until 2020.” 

“When rangers started dying,” Nile realizes. 

“Andy went through the Academy first,” says Nicky, taking his place beside Joe on the bunk. “After Ether Fury’s first kill in Bangkok, ‘21, they realized she would outlive any Jaeger.” 

Booker adds, “Copley arranged for the rest of us to be fast-tracked into the program. Once the Wall project started, funding got diverted there. He found an investor to keep us in replacement parts.”

“So the P in PPDC stands for privatized,” Nile says. 

Joe’s mouth twists. “The other P is for procrastinating. I don’t guess your crew brought any extra Conn-Pod shielding from Sydney?” Booker shakes his head. “Yeah. I’ve been on Requisitions about it for months. We can’t die so they think stuff like that doesn’t matter.”

And the D stands for dystopia. 

“We could get Andrei to make another run to Vladivostok?”

“It’s the principle, habibi.”

Nile stares into her tea. Up until Romeo Blue went down in Seattle, Jaeger pilots were celebrities. But in the past four years she’s never heard the names of the people piloting the last Jaegers until today. The world will never know who has been saving it. 

“Won’t have to put up with it much longer,” says Andy. 

“What do you mean?” Nile asks. 

“We’re going for the Breach.”

“I thought they tried that already.”

“We did,” Andy says, her eyes on something beyond this room. 

Joe says, “It’s all in the timing. When a kaiju comes through the Breach, it’s stable for a while. Nicky and I will run a nuke out to Challenger Deep while Andy and Book take the kaiju down.”

“That’s a suicide mission,” Nile says before she thinks. 

Nicky smiles a little, but there’s a grimness to it. “This is what we do.”

Nile’s mouth sours despite the tea. She stares at all of them, at Andy holding herself distant. How many times have they all died in a Jaeger? 

What is she doing here?

“I think you should get some rest,” Nicky says, gently. 

Nile nods and sets her cup down, gathers her bags. Nicky gets the door for her. Across the hall, fresh bedding and a stack of folded cadet uniforms wait for her. The room is the same size as Joe and Nicky’s, but it feels smaller somehow, without the others in it. 

She can’t fit with them. Jaegers run on pairs, and they all have theirs. Worse, she doesn’t understand why she _wants_ to. 

Nile washes her face in the sink. She looks at herself in the mirror and, for the first time since landing, is struck by the need to hear her mom’s voice. It’s followed by guilt that it didn’t occur to her earlier. 

But when she gets her phone, it has no bars. There must be some kind of signal jamming in the Shatterdome. She’ll ask Copley about it tomorrow. 

She ought to be exhausted after the fight, but there's a strange new charge in her veins. Nile wraps her braids in a scarf, gets into bed, and reads Jaeger specs on her tablet until she falls asleep. 

She dreams that she is being undone like stitches plucked from a seam. She screams, and dies, and returns to more pain, and screams again. 

She wakes to a silent room. 

When her alarm goes off, Nile scrubs down at the sink and gets dressed and follows the signs down one level to the lab. Inside, she averts her eyes from the tables of neutralized kaiju remains, and the vertical tank that holds something grotesque and still slightly alive. The diagnostic area comprises a chair and a terminal with a holographic display of DNA rotating slowly above it. 

Dr. Kozak greets her like they’re old friends and shows her to the chair, a dentist-style thing. It is adjusted to an angle so recumbent, Nile feels like she’ll be leaning backwards forever. But finally her back reaches the chair, and she makes herself relax, tells herself she is not at anyone’s mercy. 

The assistant, who manages to look goth even in scrubs, checks Nile’s vitals. She prepares a syringe, but Kozak takes over and draws Nile’s blood herself. She stays and watches the tiny wound disappear, and makes a pleased little noise. “Remarkable,” she says. She caps the syringe and hands it to the assistant to label. 

Nile swallows. “Is there a psychiatrist on staff?”

Kozak looks at her face now instead of her arm. Her brow furrows. 

“Or a counselor?” Nile tries. “Someone to talk to?” The amount of trauma they all go through regularly…

“You can talk to me, Ms. Freeman,” Kozak says. “Anytime.”

Over her dead body. Nile glances at the assistant, who meets her eyes with a serious expression, but doesn’t leave. To Kozak, she says, “I guess I’m just not sure why I’m here.”

Kozak smiles then, and looks at her with the same terrible fascination Jay did, and she puts one blue gloved hand on Nile’s wrist. “Nile, you have no idea how valuable you are.”

Nile gives her a weak smile and pretends this isn't the most disturbing thing anyone could possibly say.

Kozak clears her, and she gets back to her quarters as fast as possible. An indicator light is blinking on her tablet. She unlocks the screen and reads the notification, and says, softly but with conviction, “What the fuck.”

The steel door of Joe and Nicky’s quarters makes a satisfyingly resonant noise when Nile bangs her fist on it. Andy opens it. “What is this?” Nile says, thrusting the tablet at her. 

Andy looks at the screen like it’s distasteful to her. “Book?” she calls.

Booker comes out of the latrine, drying his face. “Yeah, Kozak pulled me today. She wants me for something.”

Nile takes the tablet back and reads the duty roster out loud for emphasis. “‘Range exercises - A. Black and N. Freeman.’ _Inside_ Spearhead. Do they not have a simulator here?” As Andy frowns silently, Nile tries to remember if there were any cameras in the sparring room. 

“Honestly Nile, I wouldn’t worry about it.” Booker pulls his jacket on. “I’m living proof that this woman can Drift with anyone.”

How encouraging. Nile stares at Andy. Andy moves aside for Booker to get out the door, and watches him go before she meets Nile’s eyes. She doesn't like this either. 

Nevertheless, they report to the Drivesuit Room just beneath the ceiling of Spearhead’s launch bay. Despite cutting corners on repairs and sticking rookies into five hundred billion dollar machines with live ammo, they do have a spare drivesuit on hand. Nile shoves herself into the clinging polymer underlayer, then the techs rivet the black shell together around her. 

When they’re finished, she rolls her shoulders to test the fit. It’s snug--but she has the strange sensation she isn’t just meant to inhabit it physically. The breadth of the pauldrons makes her stand a little straighter. The weight of the boots makes her step higher. She feels larger on an almost spiritual scale. 

The helmet is opaque. Nile looks to Andy before she puts it on. Andy lifts her brows, the only sign that she isn’t bored to death. 

Cold relay gel drains from the helmet into the suit, clearing her visor. Nile suppresses a shiver. 

She follows Andy through the hatch into Spearhead’s Conn-Pod. She’s a Mark-3, and thanks to her nuclear core, the Conn-Pod is kept separate in between deployments. Nile watches Andy secure herself in the 01 feedback cradle. “Are you always on that side?”

“There’s nothing wrong with your left hook,” Andy says, and Nile fights a smile. “Prime your comms.”

Nile’s boots and cuirass lock into the world’s shittiest elliptical machine. One switch at a time, the HUD lights up before them. 

Andy triggers her transmitter. “LOCCENT, Spearhead Rocinante is go for drop.”

It’s a good thing Nile hasn’t had breakfast yet. It’s an even better thing that they’re not Drifting yet, so Andy can’t feel this chill spike of fear as the Conn-Pod releases from its clamps. At least with her feet in the pedals, she is tethered to something. They fall, and then they are caught on Spearhead’s hydraulic receiver as gently as a feather. 

“Spearhead,” says Copley over the comms, “we’re counting down to neural handshake in fifteen. Scion’s crew would like to wish you a happy first Drift.”

“Tell them to cut the chatter,” Andy mutters, but her comm’s not on. 

“Five,” says Copley, “four, three--”

“Breathe,” Andy tells her. Nile does. The world beyond her helmet goes watery, and stretches forward into blue shadows. 

Nile is standing still, but it feels as though she’s walking down a long hall toward some distant fixed point. She passes doorways, to the left and right, and glimpses what lies beyond them. Some lead to herself: fending off her little brother’s bullies, watching two men in uniform deliver a letter to her mother, drinking with Jay and Dizzy. 

Most of the doorways lead to death. Andy’s, and others. 

She stops and turns when the wind hits her face. Horsehair blowing before her. Her hair streaming behind, long and gently waving. The steppe vast and flat around her. Absolute freedom, and a long lost lightness of spirit. 

“Andromache--”

Nile moves forward again, following the call past her own slow-motion fall from the Wall. Past a spray of blood from the curved tips of an axe. Past so many bodies. Past the others, as Andy collected them over thousands of years, the warm fond threads that connect them all. She can see Andy up ahead in her drivesuit, her back to her. 

There are rooms here for Booker too, the places he must permanently inhabit in Andy’s mind. A hospital lit in pale sunlight, a glass of water thrown to the floor. A dark skinned man in a Spearhead drivesuit, seizing as Booker eased him out of his feedback cradle, blood trickling from his nose. 

Andy’s memory now of Lykon, heroic and beloved, dying despite all the efforts of modern medicine, despite their immortality. The shock and dismay of finding that there was, after all, something that could kill them. She held his hand as he faded, plugged into IVs and heart monitors like a warped shadow of the Drift. He told her it was time. 

She’s nearly there. 

“Andromache--”

The woman turns. It’s not Andy. 

“Until the end,” she says, standing now at Nile’s left. She has the softest, saddest smile. 

Nile knows her--even outside of Andy’s mind, she has seen her before. She is the night-blooming flower Andy found in the desert, the smile that flashed in firelight, the breath in her lungs, the unkillable and unchainable and undefeated. 

She is the woman who suffers now on the other side of the Breach, burning alive. 

_alive_

_alive_

Nile can’t breathe, can’t keep her eyes open; there’s something wrong with her suit. She tries to focus on this woman but the Conn-Pod is full of lightning and seawater. Gone are the blue shadows now--they are lit by red and amber hazard lights like flames. The woman reaches her hand out, and Nile is borne upward against her will. Their connection severs like a limb. 

Wrong, all wrong. She made a promise. 

But she’s too weak to fight this. An escape pod closes around her and ascends. It goes too fast, and decompression is agony, but once she reaches the surface all she feels is rage. She beats her fists and knees bloody against the inside of the pod. She pries it open and her wounds heal and she turns to the water and she will fight the whole ocean if she has to and she screams for Quỳnh--

“Spearhead! Do you copy?”

Nile inhales. She doesn’t dare turn her head, for fear of slipping out of alignment. Instead she looks as far as she can in her peripheral vision. Andy is bent in the same position she is, as if still doubled over from the pain of decompression. “Shut it down,” Nile says, and then remembers she’s not transmitting, and smacks the comms panel. “Shut down the power!”

“That’s a negative, Roci.” Joe’s voice now, steady but urgent. “You’ve got to stand back up.”

“Are you shitting me?”

“I really am not.”

Outside the Conn-Pod, the launch bay is at an odd angle. She can see the war clock, much too close. Spearhead has followed Andy’s posture down to one knee, leaning forward, and Nile can hear--no, feel--the protest of her muscle strands. Joe is right: if they shut down now, Spearhead will tip forward and things will get much worse. 

“You’re still in alignment,” Nicky says. “You can do this. Boss?”

“Yeah,” Andy pants. “Just let me get it under control.” 

She breathes. Nile _feels_ her breathe. Nile breathes along. There’s a heart rate ticker at the bottom of their display; Nile watches it slow, little by little, for both of them. 

“With me,” Andy says, and Nile is. Completely.

Nile feels her intent before Andy moves. She puts her left and out, and Spearhead’s titanic gauntlet presses flat to the deck. Nile can feel that, too, against her palm. She feels gimbals settle in Spearhead’s elbow and wrist, maintaining their position. She feels a heaviness around her that has nothing to do with the rig at her back. It’s the mass of Spearhead, another shell outside her drivesuit. The world resting on their shoulders. 

Silently they lift Spearhead’s left leg and plant her foot. 

“Looking good, Roci.”

They balance their weight on both feet, and rise. 

It’s an effort. It hurts. Nile groans, and Andy bears it as she bears all her pain, in silence. But they do stand. Eye level with LOCCENT’s windows now, Nile sees Joe and Nicky lean back from the comms in relief. 

Copley returns to his seat. “Spearhead, your neural handshake is strong and holding. You’re fully functional and green for range exercises at your discretion.”

Buoyant with the triumph of operating this colossus, Nile lets out an incredulous little laugh. How many people could have died just now? She turns to see if Andy can even believe these fools. 

She goes still at the sight of blood trickling from Andy’s nose. 

Andy gazes back at her, not understanding. Not until the blood reaches her lip, and she tastes it there.

Nile’s hand finds the comms panel. “LOCCENT, I’ve had enough excitement for one day.”

“Copy that, Spearhead.”

They step fully back into their bay to make things easier for the techs. Nile straightens her back and drops her shoulders along with Andy. The Pons system is deactivated remotely from LOCCENT; Nile feels it happen like a switch, but the light it was connected to goes out gradually. 

Andy yanks her helmet off, wipes her face, and checks with Nile before they disconnect from the cradles. Nile nods. 

Then it’s out of their suits and on to Kozak’s ministrations. The brain scan doesn’t take long, and while she waits on Andy, Nile’s eyes wander the lab. The vertical tank stands empty now. They must have transferred whatever was in it to one of the morgue-style cabinets in the wall.

The back of her neck prickles. She turns back in time to see Kozak draw Andy’s blood. 

This is a whole new species of panic. Nile locks eyes with Andy over Kozak’s shoulder, and Andy looks resigned, but Nile sure the hell is not. As soon as the needle is clear of Andy’s skin, Nile says, “Doctor Kozak?” 

Kozak turns. Andy puts her jacket back on to cover the wound that won’t heal. “Where’s Booker?” Nile asks. 

“He’s running an errand in the city.” There is a challenge in Kozak’s eyes. Nile can’t tell whether she’s daring her to call her bluff, or she’s smug about the fact that she can order them around. “Gathering some black market kaiju samples for Celeste.” 

Nile peers at the assistant. “You’re in charge of K-Sci?”

Celeste seems alarmed to have her attention. “I just think they’re neat.” 

Andy’s up off the chair now, nodding Nile toward the door. “Will you send him by when he gets back?” Nile says. 

“Of course.” Kozak’s eyes follow her out. 

Andy walks apart from Nile all the way to the residential hex, until they’re outside Joe and Nicky’s quarters, where she presses up to Nile’s side and steers them to her room instead. And that’s fine. If Andy wants some solitude, she can have it. Nile could really go for the quiet herself. 

“You did good,” Andy says when Nile shuts the door behind them. 

“You are not gonna tell me that’s how it was supposed to go.”

Andy’s smile is small, and tired. “The Drift was strong.” She sits on Nile’s bunk long enough to get her boots off, then lies down on her side. “Get some sleep while you can, Nile,” she says, eyes already closed. 

“You’re in _my_ bed,” Nile protests. 

Andy shrugs. 

They’re not going to talk about any of it. The near catastrophe, the lost copilot who is miraculously alive, the sudden onset of mortality. Talking isn’t how Andy solves things. 

Well, fine. Nile’s starving anyway. 

She steps out of her quarters and finds Joe and Nicky waiting with a tray. “She in there?” Joe asks. 

Nile nods. “Sleeping.” He and Nicky both come down a notch in threat-readiness. They wait while Nile sits on the stoop and eats half the food, then, as quietly as she can, opens the door and slides the tray inside. 

Only when she shuts it again does Nicky ask, “What happened, Nile?” 

“You saw it. We bombed.”

Joe and Nicky share a glance. “Nile,” Joe says, and Nile can hear how he’s walking on eggshells, which isn’t like him. “Nobody died.”

Nile sighs, “Only because Andy can Drift with anyone.”

Joe crouches down to look her in the eye. “If Andy didn’t _want_ to make a connection with you, that Jaeger never would have moved.” 

“If she didn’t want to make a connection with you,” Nicky adds, “she would have put you on the floor much earlier.” Flattering.

“We haven’t seen her fight like that since--in years,” Joe says. 

Nile hears what he doesn’t say. She looks at Joe, trying so hard to reassure her, and at Nicky, burdened with worry, and she nods toward their quarters. 

“Back in the Academy,” Joe says as they file in, “they wanted to test us for cross-compatibility.” He sits on the bunk, Nicky beside him. Nile stays standing. “They stuck me and Andy in a simulator because our numbers are the closest. But neither of us wanted to swap co-pilots, or prove that we could. We got all kitted out, the Pons booted up, and--nothing. It was like they plugged me into a glacier.”

Nicky tells her, “Andy walked out and said, _Oh shit, I guess we’re not compatible_.”

Nile says, “Quỳnh’s alive,” and the smiles drop off their faces. “I dreamed of her. I didn’t understand until the Drift.”

The look in their eyes is too much. She won’t tell them about Andy--keeping that secret could not be worse than the guilt and horror already on their faces. And it isn’t hers to tell. 

“When the mission failed,” Nicky says softly, “Viper Fury went down in the Trench. We searched, but we never found her.”

“She’s not in the Trench,” Nile whispers. 

They stare at each other, then at her. “What did you see?” Joe pleads. 

Nile shuts her eyes and shakes her head. “She’s being taken apart.”

She can’t do it anymore. She flees before they can ask her anything else. 

Out of the residential hex, past the combat room and what appears to be a perfectly functional simulator, into a quieter part of the ‘Dome. Nile stares at her feet and keeps them moving until her eyes stop burning with Andy’s pain. 

When she looks up again, she’s outside an open door. She pokes her head in. 

“Ms. Freeman,” Copley says, surprised. “Please come in. Tea?”

Nile steps into his office. Copley stands from behind a computer terminal. “No, thanks,” she says. 

There are photos and clippings all down the opposite wall. One of Nile’s x-rays hangs at the far right. She’s drawn to a photo near it, a candid--or maybe a still from security footage. Lykon and Booker in their drivesuits, with several of Spearhead’s J-Techs. It looks like a celebration, maybe post-kill. There was something cheeky in Lykon’s grin, and an openness to Booker’s that Nile would never have expected from the man she met in the mess hall. 

“You acquitted yourself very well this morning,” Copley says, pouring for himself from a tea service made of terra cotta. 

“Everyone keeps saying that,” Nile sighs. Next to the picture there’s a photocopy of dogtags in black rubber silencers: 

FARRIER,L  
O POS  
PPDC

Above that hangs the double axehead emblem that adorned Viper Fury and her predecessors. 

Nearby, a clipped headline: _Three Jaeger Team Drop Saves Hawaii_.

The farther she moves to the left, the older the images get. Six figures in hazmat suits at the top of a Reuters article, treating an unnaturally blue shoreline. The closest one is in profile; Lykon’s face is visible through the visor. 

Quỳnh, distributing hot meals in the superdome after Hurricane Katrina. Booker, carrying the front of a stretcher in Sarajevo. Joe, in a refugee camp in the DRC. Andy, on the Berlin Wall. Nicky, putting a bandage on a French child. 1936. 1861. 1853. And on, and on. 

Andy’s memories were so bloody. Nile might have been horrified if she was on the outside looking in, but she wasn’t--she was sharing a brain with Andy, and what could she do but accept her completely? Now, though, she understands so much more. Nile saw the things Andy can’t forget. Here are all the things that weren’t in the Drift, because Andy didn’t believe they made her who she is. 

“They’ve been everywhere,” Nile says. 

“Yes,” says Copley, between sips of tea. “When you think about how old they are, the good they’ve done for humanity becomes exponential.”

She looks askance at him. He has no uniform, no rank, but he is without a doubt the brass who pulls the strings here. His whole image says _middle management_. The guy who fades into the scenery, but somehow gets promoted anyway. 

“What are you getting out of this?” Nile says. 

A corner of his mouth twitches, like he doesn’t understand the question. “Back before the war,” he says after a moment, “I was CIA. I contracted with the six of them for an assignment in Surabaya. Unfortunately our intelligence was limited, and I found out too late they were going up against a significantly larger force than anticipated. Somehow, they all survived to collect their payment. I couldn’t figure it out. Got obsessed, started looking for anything I could find about them. The first scrap I dug up was from sixty years ago. From there…” He gestures at the wall. 

“I got back in contact with Booker in 2019. He confirmed what I suspected. The war was at its tipping point by then, and we thought, if they could get into a Jaeger, it would be an advantage. All of which is to say... I suppose what I’m getting is a chance to know them.” 

But he isn’t one of them. She’s certain he’s never been invited into Joe and Nicky’s quarters, never asked to sit with them at supper. He’d have a better shot at their camaraderie--if that’s really what he wants--if he worked in J-Tech. 

“By sending them out to die,” she challenges. 

“They volunteered.” And she didn’t. But she’s certainly in it now. Nile shakes her head and Copley tries, “They’re saving the world. Humanity needs them to share their gifts.”

“To fight monsters,” Nile says, “not to be monitored and confined. And you’re keeping their secret?” 

“They requested secrecy when they signed on.”

Which isn’t quite what she asked. “Convenient.” She turns back to the wall. “Do you know where Booker is right now?”

“Hang on, let me check his microchip.” Nile whirls on him, eyes wide, and Copley holds up his free hand. “Joke.”

Nile puts enough acid in her voice to rival kaiju blood. “Sure.”

He sighs. “I haven’t spoken to Ranger le Livre since last night. He had some glowing words to say about your performance in the combat room.”

She would say nice things about someone who made her five hundred bucks too. “So you put me on range exercises. Why would he want Andy to get a new copilot?”

“These are the last days of war,” Copley says. “We can’t afford not to have every possible resource at our disposal. Booker agreed there was potential.”

Potential to blow the whole Shatterdome to bits, if they had fallen. “You know what their plan is?”

His eyes are tired now. “How do you think they got their hands on a nuke?”

A pretty big string to pull. “And what happens when the Breach is closed?”

“I don’t follow,” he says with affected innocence. 

“You’re going to let them go,” Nile says. It isn’t a question. 

Copley takes a breath. “They aren’t prisoners, Ms. Freeman, and neither are you.” 

Nile lets her face show how much she believes that. But for now, she takes him at his word, and leaves his office. 

She finds access to the roof around the ‘Dome. She left her phone inside, or she would check for a signal here. Instead, she looks out to sea for a long time. It would be a good spot to pray, but she can't come up with any words. There are billions of people praying every day for the war to stop. If God won't listen to them, Nile can't see any point in adding her voice. 

And anyway, God put her here, where she can do something about it. Maybe that's the only answer she'll get.

Nile goes back inside when the shadows get long. She takes food from the mess hall and eats it on a gantry, watching J-Techs touch up Scion Heliac’s sky blue color scheme. She stays alone with her thoughts as long as she can stand. 

She Drifted secondhand, in a way, with Booker. It was enough to know how badly Booker wants to end it all. She Drifted with Andy, and it was enough to know Nile shouldn’t ask what Andy will do once the Breach is closed. Not just because Andy has never thought that far into the future. She made a _promise_. 

And once the Breach is closed, Quỳnh will truly be gone. 

They are no strangers to sacrifice. 

Back in her quarters, Andy is awake, finishing off a bowl of blue jello and looking at Nile’s phone. “Your mom and brother?” she greets. 

“Yeah.” Andy hands the phone over and Nile gazes down at them. She would have seen just about all of it in the Drift. Her father’s funeral, the way work got scarce in Chicago once waves of people started moving inland from the west coast. How hard they struggled.

“You come from warriors,” Andy says. 

“Yeah. I do.” Nile considers her. The only faces in her Drift were Joe and Nicky, Booker and Lykon, and Quỳnh. No matter how much she tries to think of them as her soldiers, to compartmentalize them the way she puts her Drift memories neatly away, it’s obvious what they are to her. 

Andy will hate what Nile has to say next, but it has to be said. “When Booker gets back, I’m going into the simulator with him, to make sure we can Drift. You’re going to train me. And the next time the Breach opens, we’ll be ready for the mission.”

But Andy leans back against the wall and watches Nile and shakes her head gently, as expected. Andy won’t go quietly, won’t fade away with an IV in her arm. Andy knows exactly where she wants to die. 

As for Nile, well. She should by rights have died at the bottom of the Wall. She never spent much time thinking about what to do with her life, not with the world ending and prospects drying up around her. But she has been given a chance to see this through. 

“Until the end,” Andy says. 

Nile’s eyes sting, but what can she do but accept it? 

A bulb over her door lights up amber, goes out, lights up again. 

Andy is on her feet faster than Nile can ask what the light is for. “We gotta go.”

They join a stream of techs and LOCCENT crew in the corridor, all bound for the launch bays. It’s terribly quiet. Red and amber lights flash at intervals on the walls. Joe and Nicky are yards ahead, shoulder to shoulder and moving fast. The four of them meet in the drivesuit room and suit up silently. When they’re ready, Andy and Nile in black and Joe and Nicky in blue, Andy leads them out and down to LOCCENT, to the edge of the crowd, where Copley addresses the staff. 

“The Breach was exposed at 2300 hours. We have two signatures, both Category IVs. Designated Otachi and Leatherback. They’ll reach Hong Kong within the hour.”

Andy nods when Joe looks to her. As Copley goes on about evacuation plans, Nile catches up. The plan for the bomb run assumed a single kaiju would emerge from the Breach. Surviving one Category IV was already a doubtful prospect, but two?

They can’t defend the city and still complete the mission. 

Copley hesitates, eyeing Andy, and Nile can see he wants to talk about the other ways this could go. They could make the run anyway, and hope to bait the kaiju into following them back toward the Breach. They could put eight million souls on the balance scale against billions, put all their money on the plan succeeding this time, and spend the rest of their long lives with that on their conscience. 

But they won’t. They will do what every ranger in the Jaeger program did before them, and what Andy and Joe and Nicky and Booker and Lykon and Quỳnh have done for centuries: save everyone they can save now. 

Nile breathes in and squares her shoulders at the same time Andy does. “We’re going out there,” Andy says. 

Copley meets her gaze solemnly. “Good hunting, rangers.” 

Nile trails Andy onto the upper gantry and through Spearhead’s hatch. She waits as their feedback cradles swing down into place and she watches Andy’s face. If this is the last time they Drift, Nile ought to say something, but she can’t for the life of her think of what. 

Spearhead’s rig guides her into physical alignment with the Jaeger. The Pons unit guides her mind into alignment with Andy’s. In the Drift her doubt evaporates, because Andy leaves no space for doubt. 

Nile shouldn’t mess with the neural handshake, should let it unfold organically to avoid a repeat of last time, but she can’t help it. She tries to show Andy what she saw in Copley’s office. All the good she’s done. 

“I’m not dead yet,” Andy says. 

Nile rolls her eyes. When Andy steps, she steps, and Spearhead steps, and that’s a good start. The launch bay door opens before them. They walk out into the water and the rain. 

The choppers tow Scion overhead and out into the Miracle Mile. Joe’s voice sounds in her helmet, jubilant with adrenaline. “Keep hugging that coastline, Roci--we’ll toss you something to tangle with.”

“Be advised,” says Copley, “satellite reports indicate these are the largest Category IVs yet in both size and weight.”

“Copy that, LOCCENT.” There’s something cheesy in the back of Andy’s mind about _the harder they fall_ , but to Nile’s relief she doesn’t say it out loud. Andy’s restless anticipation burns in Nile’s veins too; it carries a laser focus that settles her anxiety. 

In the distance, Scion splashes down in the bay, water over their knees. Nile watches the HUD as their searchlight sweeps through the rain. A mass appears on the sonar display, in motion at Scion’s right, and Nile points at the same instant Andy says, “Three o’clock, Scion.” 

The water erupts. Nile can’t see much from here even when Spearhead’s visual display zooms in. The kaiju codenamed Otachi is sinuous and horned. It turns, whips a long tail, and sends Scion reeling. 

Everything in Nile wants to run to them, and she feels the same in Andy. But the second kaiju is still out here somewhere. 

When they recover their footing, Scion sweeps both arms to their sides, and twin blades extend from the shielding on their forearms. Andy’s satisfaction swells in the Drift. How she loves to watch them work. 

Scion comes in swinging at Otachi, producing sprays of blue blood. Otachi seizes their arms and Scion twists at the waist in a way that shouldn’t be possible, _wouldn’t_ be possible for a human. Scion drops to their knees in the bay and levers Otachi over their shoulder. 

“You were being literal,” Nile says as a twenty-six hundred ton kaiju is flung bodily toward them. 

“All yours,” Joe pants. 

But Otachi pays Spearhead no mind. It faces Scion again, crouches like a cat, and sprays a stream of luminous blue acid at their Conn-Pod. 

Spearhead is in motion before Nile can tell Andy to fang it. Which isn’t a term she knew before today, but Andy spent a lot of time in Australia. The water resists them at first, so they lean forward like a linebacker, using Spearhead’s weight to lend momentum. 

Otachi is latched on to Scion’s arm now, and they stumble backwards against its grasp. “Hull is compromised! We need--”

The kaiju’s prehensile tail rears up and fixes on Scion’s Conn-Pod. When it pulls back, the right half is gone. 

Nile’s heart stops. Andy lets out an agonized cross between a snarl and a howl. They’re still a hundred yards out. 

And Scion, incredibly, is still standing. Their right arm holds Otachi’s jaw and the left hacks at the kaiju again and again. Otachi writhes. The comms are dead silent. 

They’re nearly there. In front of Spearhead, the surface of the water bulges and explodes. 

Leatherback should have been named Silverback. He has the proportions of a gorilla and he springs at Spearhead with one huge hand outstretched toward the Conn-Pod, to bear her down to the water. 

But Andy’s reflexes move faster than synapses, and Nile leans with her, no advance coordination necessary, backward and to the side. They take the blow glancingly on the left shoulder and dodge past Leatherback’s bulk, and push on toward Scion. Nile didn’t see where Joe was cast away, but she hopes it was farther out to sea. 

They’re in spitting distance of Otachi, priming the anti-kaiju missiles, when a shockwave of azure energy sweeps past and through them. 

Nile screams as electricity arcs down the feedback cradle, into her suit, and through the Pons unit. Her connection with Andy dies painfully, and Spearhead sways beneath their feet before finally settling in her joints, upright but lifeless. Outside their hex-patterned viewport, Scion, too, has gone dark. 

“Motherfucker,” Andy hisses, ripping off her helmet. 

“What was that?” Nile groans. She watches Otachi snap her jaws at Scion one more time, as if in laughter, and then slip away through the water. 

“We’ve never seen that before.” Andy smacks the comms panel, but it’s no use. 

Vapor sprays as Leatherback circles around them to investigate. He’s ugly as hell. 

“Brace,” Andy says, and Nile grabs the arm of the rig, and Leatherback shoves their Conn-Pod like he wants to pick a fight. 

Her legs wrench in the pedals. Only the feedback cradles keep them from pinballing around inside. “I want you to know,” Nile says, “if he does that again I’m gonna hurl.”

But Leatherback prowls one more circle and then turns to go menace Scion instead. 

“You read the manual, right?” Andy says, dangerously quiet. 

“Yeah?” They’re not in the Drift anymore, and Nile doesn’t have a hope in hell of predicting what this woman will do without it. 

Andy disengages from the feedback cradle. “Get the turbine running again.”

“What are you doing?” Nile demands. 

Andy spares a glance back at her as she takes three chunky pistols out of a compartment by the hatch. Then she’s out, into the rain. 

Nile takes a deep breath. Nicky just demonstrated that they can pilot solo. As horrifying and excruciating as it would be, if her copilot slips off their Jaeger and drowns in Hong Kong Bay, that’s what Nile will have to do. And she can’t if Spearhead is dead in the water. 

Spearhead’s nuclear core is still plenty hot, but the blast shut down the power that ran the water pumps. She is standing at the top of a very fancy steam engine--one which can blow up spectacularly, yes, but still. All the technological innovation of the last two centuries, and they still run on such a simple principle. 

Nile disengages from the harness and reaches under her boots, down in the workings of the cradle, to find a glow-in-the-dark plastic handle. She turns it, locking her pedals into manual pump mode. When she moves enough water through the reactor, the steam will force the turbine to spin and restore power. Or so the manual claimed. 

This part is going to suck. It is, like everything else, meant to be done by two pilots. 

“Okay,” she says out loud, because that was how Mom got the car to start in the wintertime. “Do you prefer Spearhead?” She strains, and after a few seconds, the left pedal descends. “Or Roci?” The right pedal goes easier. “We gotta get moving, Roci. I know I’m new here, but it’s for Andy, okay?” 

She’s working against the resistance of fan pumps inside the reactor, as well as the ones that bring in seawater for the condenser. They put in a gearset to make it as easy as possible, but it is nevertheless Nile’s quads versus an object at rest that weighs two thousand tons, and it’s far worse than running Roci fully powered through the bay. 

Outside, a magenta comet shoots from the top of the Conn-Pod toward Leatherback. “Andy,” Nile gasps, “what the fuck.” 

The flare strikes the side of Leatherback’s face. He turns toward Roci. Nile pushes harder. 

Andy shoots the kaiju again, in the eye. 

Roci’s turbine roars to life. Nile feels the thrum of it in her own ribs. 

Leatherback lowers his head, and charges. 

“Andy!” Nile forces the pedals to stop, and reaches down to reset them for their usual purpose. As the HUD flickers into place, Leatherback gets bigger and bigger. Andy slams the hatch behind her and lopes back to the 01 cradle. 

Nile reaches for her in the Drift. Andy meets her halfway. It is instantaneous and seamless, because it has to be. 

Leatherback throws himself at Roci’s torso, but he didn’t learn anything the first time. They sidestep and shove him upright, duck under his wild swing, and grab the strange appendage that’s starting to spark on his back. Before he has a chance to shut them down with another blast, they rip it off him. 

He grapples Roci in a bear hug and throws them like a discus. They spend an exceptionally, terrifyingly long time airborne before they crash through a bridge and into the harbor’s shipping containers. The impact thunders through Roci and the circuitry suit, in addition to jarring every bone in Nile’s body. But they’re still upright, crouched and ready when Leatherback climbs out of the bay and roars at them. 

Andy has had enough of this shit. She charges the plasma cannon as they run. 

A blast from the rear jets carries them into a leap, and Nile hooks Roci’s left hand behind one of the armored plates on Leatherback’s head. He rears back but they don’t let go. Andy puts the plasma cannon under Leatherback’s jaw and fires twice. 

He won’t be getting up from that. 

Nile gets just a moment to breathe, to lift the plasma cannon like a gunslinger as it transforms back into Roci’s hand, to feel the rush of her first kill and of Andy’s pride. Then they turn toward the city. 

They pause at the edge of the docks. Nile is in Andy’s brain and she knows what she’s thinking, but she squints at her anyway. “Really?” 

Andy’s eyes are very old and very feral. “Go big or go home,” she says. 

Nile sighs, and stoops to pick up an oil tanker. 

In the boneslums, Otachi bends over something in the street like a carrion bird that found roadkill. It turns when Roci’s footsteps shake the pavement. 

There are no secrets in the Drift, no hiding. Nile can’t hide how cathartic it feels to slam the tanker into Otachi’s face, and Andy doesn’t bother hiding how that pleases her, and they are a little closed circuit of grisly joy. Nile swings again from her side, with technique that would make her softball coach proud. That’s just for them. 

It’s a silicon-based Swiss Army knife, but even Otachi runs out of tricks eventually. They’re ready when it does the tail thing again. They let it grab the tanker, and in exchange, they grab its tail and turn to hold it close against them. Nile vents Roci’s coolant ports until Otachi’s tail is thoroughly frosted, and it crumbles when they move. That’s for Joe. 

Now it’s pissed. It launches another gout of acid at them, which they barely dodge. Andy, whip fast, grabs the acid sac; Nile shoves at Otachi’s head until they tear it out. That’s for Nicky. 

Otachi screeches and leaps on them. Its claws tear into Roci’s torso and it forces them down on their back, and Nile smells her circuitry suit burning. The pain barely registers--she’s been powering through it this whole time. 

What does register is when Otachi, backlit by lightning, spreads an impossibly large pair of wings. 

They are hoisted up until Nile can see the Earth’s curvature and the glow of dawn. There is probably no coming back from this. Or at least Nile, in the brief time she has, can’t imagine a way of coming back from this, regardless of immortality. 

Roci is failing around them: hull punctured, fuel leaking, oxygen jetting into the stratosphere. Otachi doesn’t look great either, so at least Nile can go to the afterlife with the knowledge that she made one and a half kaiju kills. Not bad for a welder. 

And still, Andy’s calm is absolute. She straightens as best she can in the cradle, and Nile follows the snap of her right arm, knowing, because Andy knows, what comes next. 

A forty-foot cylinder of obsidian steel telescopes out from Roci’s bracer. At its tip, curved segments fan out and lock together to form two halves of a circle. Sunlight flashes along its wicked edge. 

This is for all of them. 

The labrys severs Otachi’s serpentine neck in one clean arc. It releases its hold on them, and--fuck, this is worse. Nile hates falling so _much_. 

“Hey, Nile.” Andy’s voice is cool, a still point outside the Drift, where Nile runs the risk of dragging them both into the memory of her death. She purges their fuel through the turbine but it doesn’t slow their descent enough to matter. Nile senses her withdraw, guarding herself, so Nile won’t feel Andy’s pain on top of her own. She says, “You’re gonna live.”

Nile makes a noise. Could be a laugh, could be a groan; it’s hard to tell. They ball up, tucking Roci’s legs, and land like a meteor in Hong Kong Stadium. 

“Andy?” Nile coughs in the darkened Conn-Pod. “You okay?”

Andy opens up in the Drift again, just a wisp of her. “Yeah, I’m fine,” she gasps. “It just hurts. Actually, everything hurts.”

Nile lets her feel her relief. She hasn’t had three Drift partners and doesn’t have Andy’s control, but she can do that. “Well, wait until tomorrow.” 

Andy’s low chuckle is a beautiful sound. “Can’t wait.” 

They walk Roci home, a dragonslayer running on diesel fumes. 

The echo of the Drift is still prickling down Nile’s spine as they descend the gantry into a crowd of cheering ‘Dome staff. Even the strike troopers are smiling. 

Nile is shaking hands with one of Roci’s J-Techs when Joe shoulders through. He hugs Andy forcefully enough to pick her up and carry her a few steps. They laugh, bright. Too bright to watch. Nile starts to turn away, but Nicky’s arm settles across her shoulders and he walks her over to join them. 

Andy and Joe fold them in against drivesuit and jacket; the four of them together smell of seawater and sweat and decontamination spray and melted polymer. 

“Knew I made the right bet,” Nicky says in Nile’s ear. 

Nile’s face hurts from grinning. She looks to Andy--and brings her hand up to her nose to warn her. 

But she’s too late. Joe and Nicky have already seen the fresh blood. Their euphoria drains away. “Let’s go,” Nicky urges, and they turn as a unit and thread through the crowd. Joe keeps his hand on Andy’s back all the way to their quarters. 

In private at last, Nicky fishes a battery powered drill and a ratchet out of a drawer. Nile pushes the desk chair against the back of Andy’s legs until she has no choice but to sit. Joe bends to get Andy’s drivesuit off while Nicky does Nile’s. They work in silence. 

Once the cuirasses are in a pile on the floor, Andy sighs and gets her hand under the collar of her circuitry suit. It comes away bloody. 

Joe curses softly and undoes the seals down the back. Andy peels her right arm out of the suit. The wires burned their way out of the material and, as she moved, cut gouges across her shoulder. Farther down her arm, the circuitry left linear burns. They almost resemble Otachi’s clawmarks, but more angular. 

Andy turns her head to look at her shoulder, sucks a breath through her nose, and turns quickly away. 

Joe puts his hand out but stops shy of touching Andy. He looks back at them, stricken. Nicky crosses the room in three strides and finds a clean T-shirt. “Hot water, please,” he says to Nile as he tears it into strips. 

Nile takes the kettle to the sink even though hot water and clean cotton isn’t going to do shit for Andy. They have no medical supplies and no way to get any without drawing Kozak’s attention. 

Someone knocks on the hatch. 

“Don’t,” Joe warns. 

“What if it’s Booker?”

“Booker doesn’t knock.”

Fair. But Nile goes to the door anyway and looks out the peephole. She turns the handwheel and opens the hatch a crack. 

“Does she need help?” asks the assistant, the _h_ vanishing in her soft accent. She brought a decent size first aid kit, branded with a Merrick Pharmaceuticals logo.

“Yes,” Nile says, gratified to know there is one decent and trustworthy human on PPDC payroll. She lets her in.

Joe stands at Andy’s back so the assistant can’t see the extent of it. Nicky adjusts the lay of the circuitry suit and says, “Leave the kit. I can do it.” 

“It’s fine,” Andy tells him. “Go on.” Nile knows what she’s always tried to be for them, understands why Andy would rather have a stranger do this. 

They go. They look back, but they go. 

Out in the corridor Nile braces herself. Keeping this from them isn’t like keeping some other secret she saw in the Drift, like Andy using too much toilet paper or something. 

They’ve had Andy for a thousand years. Nile got here yesterday. 

“You knew after the first Drift?” Nicky says, voice rough with exhaustion. Nile nods. He looks down at the deck plates, or past them, and his jaw works. They couldn’t have stopped Andy from getting back in that Jaeger any more than she could, and she knows they know it, but he can be mad. That’s fine. 

Joe puts his hands on his hips and takes a deep breath. “Why don’t you get changed, Nile?”

The suit is clammy against her skin. Nile nods and goes into her room. 

There is a jacket on her bunk. Brown leather, red lining, fur collar. It smells of leather conditioner and spray paint from the two kill markers freshly stenciled on the right side. There was no time to add the Spearhead patch, but they slipped it into one of the pockets. 

After she strips out the circuitry suit and washes her sweat and dried blood away and gets fresh clothes, she puts it on. It hits at her hip. It’s heavy, but there’s a certain security in that. 

“You did this this morning?” she says as she comes out. 

Nicky’s eyes are red-rimmed, but the corners of his mouth hitch upward at the sight of her. “When we saw you were on the roster,” he confirms. 

“You look great,” Joe says, eyes crinkling. 

The door opens behind them, saving Nile from having to answer, and Celeste steps out empty-handed. “I’ll bring more supplies tomorrow,” she says. 

They should all live so long. 

“Thank you,” Nicky tells her, and Celeste nods once and leaves them. 

Back in their quarters, Andy pulls on a tank. Her shoulder is covered in white bandages, and ointment glistens on the burns down her arm. 

“Gotta admit, boss,” Joe says, “I’m kind of jealous.”

“Those are hot,” Nicky agrees. 

Andy shoves her arms into her jacket, but for a few seconds she’s smiling. “We need to talk about the plan,” she says. 

Nile sits at the edge of the desk. “You need to rest.”

“So does Nicky,” Joe says, and pulls him to the bunk. 

“So do you, hayati.”

“I had a good long sleep in the bay.” Joe says it lightly, but Nicky shuts his eyes and exhales. 

“We hit the point of no return,” Andy says, bringing them back. “It’s only going to be double events from now on, until it’s a triple.”

“They came right to us,” Nicky says. “It wasn’t random. They want to finish us off even more than they want to destroy shit.”

Andy nods. “We have to get out in front of it. It’s been two days since Sydney. They won’t wait that long again, and if we let them make the first move, people will die.” 

Nile says, “Will the PPDC let us deploy without an active threat?”

In answer, Andy looks at her, and then at Joe and Nicky. Their silent agreement is heavy in the air, a shared resolve that far predates the technology to Drift, but is just as strong. 

The PPDC can try to stop them. 

“So we camp out at the Breach?” Joe says, over the creak of the hatch opening. “No one’s spent a full day in the Drift since the Mark-1 years.” But the moment he says it, Nile knows in her gut that they can pull that off, too. 

Booker asks, “Who’s camping out at the Breach?”

They all turn to watch him come in. He looks like hell, damp and sweaty, blood on his shirt collar. 

“Welcome back, asshole,” says Andy. 

“Hi, boss.” Booker flops onto his cot with a grunt. “Hell of a day, huh?”

“You said it, mon frère,” says Joe. His voice is still light but his face is hard. “What kept you?” 

Booker looks at each of them as he gets his flask out. His eyes linger on Nile’s jacket and then slide away. He makes an open-handed gesture. “We’re losing, guys.” 

“It’s a war of attrition,” Nicky says doggedly. “We always win those in the end.”

“That’s an easy thing to say when you’ve never lost your copilot.”

Joe and Nicky both bristle, but Andy talks first. “Book, get to the point.”

First, Booker drinks. Then he says, “The intel we have isn’t good enough to get us into the Breach. Gotta know the terrain before you march. So Kozak had this idea: if two pilots can share memories in the Drift, maybe a pilot and a kaiju can do the same.”

Oh, that woman is an honest to God mad scientist. 

“We’re not doing it.” Joe speaks for all of them. 

Booker glances at him, glances away. 

“You already did it,” Andy says flatly. 

Booker nods. Nile feels ill. Nicky says, “When?”

“This morning. And--” Booker checks his watch--”forty-five minutes ago.” He nods to Andy and Nile. “Thanks for the spare brain.” 

“You clearly need one,” Nile says, and Booker, in spite of literally everything, grins. 

“How was it?” says Andy, not even bothering to hide her fascination. 

“Bad. The neural load probably killed me for a minute. But it worked--I know why we couldn’t get through the Breach before. And the kaiju, they’ve got this… hive mind? That’s the only way I can describe it. Every time they attack, they’re sharing that experience, across the Breach. It’s how they’ve evolved and learned our weaknesses.” 

Nile realizes what that means in the same moment Nicky puts his hands over his face, but Booker goes on, “The kaiju are cloned. It’s a goddamn assembly line, Nicky--they’ve got an infinite supply and we’ve lost a third of us in four years. We have to end this.”

“How?” says Joe.

“The bomb will bounce off the Breach again, whether or not it’s open and stable. Unless we get hold of a kaiju and ride it in. It’ll let us pass then--like a keycard.”

Great. Simple. 

“What if doing this had killed you, Book?” says Andy, terribly quiet. “Was that going to be a fringe benefit?”

Booker takes a swig from his flask. 

A whole lot of stuff falls into place at once for Nile. “If it killed you,” she says, “Andy would still have a copilot.” 

“And if it killed us?” says Joe. Booker peers at him. “You gazed into the abyss. Did you hear yourself talking about our weaknesses? Otachi went _straight_ for the Conn-Pod.” 

Nile stares at the opposite wall. Even taking the PPDC’s panopticon into account, they found her way too fast. That chopper would have had to be in flight before her chart was in the computer system. But if someone dreamed of her and said something… 

She turns to Booker, who is visibly grappling with the gravity of what he’s done, and she says, “Did you tell Copley about me?”

He won’t meet her gaze. “Believe it or not, you’re better off here with us than you are out there alone. And this is bigger than any of us.” 

Nile sets her jaw. 

“ _Wow_ ,” Joe says, getting to his feet, not that there’s any room to pace. “You can talk yourself into anything, can’t you? Welcome to the team, Nile! Booker sold your secret, and now he sold all of ours to the interdimensional monsters destroying the world.”

“Joe,” Booker starts, but Joe has said his piece and now he shoves his hands in his pockets and faces Andy, urging her with his eyes. 

Andy sighs through her nose, and shrugs the jacket off her shoulder. 

Booker stares at her bandages. “Andy,” he breathes. “You didn’t…” She couldn’t have told him, and it wouldn’t have been in their last Drift. 

Andy just shakes her head. 

Booker shuts his eyes and leans his head back against the wall. “I’m sorry, Andy.”

“Now you’re sorry,” says Joe, with something brittle in his voice. “You selfish piece of shit--”

“Stop,” Andy tells him. Joe stops, brows angled in dismay now instead of anger. “This is not the time for it. Book--we can’t have the rest of this conversation with you in the room.”

Booker is still so long that Nile wonders if he heard her. Finally he nods and stands up. Joe doesn't make room for him. For a moment they’re chest to chest, and then Booker sidesteps him and walks out. 

“Boss,” says Nicky into the long silence, “he should be the one carrying the risks of this mission. Not you.” 

Andy’s eyes burn, but she says nothing. 

“I can make it work,” Nile volunteers. Her anger has blown out and she’s just weary. Booker was right about one thing: this is bigger than any of them. 

“No, he’s a liability,” Joe says. He lowers himself to sit on Booker’s cot, looking very old. “For all we know, he’s got a live connection to the Anteverse right now.”

“If he does, so do I,” Nile argues. “I dreamed of Quỳnh. She’s on the other side of the Breach, dreaming of me.” 

“It only works when you’re unconscious,” Joe assures her.

“So I just won’t sleep until after we hit the Breach?”

“I don’t suppose any of us will,” Nicky says. 

They all get quiet again. 

“Two hours to rest,” Andy decrees. “You too, Nile.” 

“Oh, but I know the plan,” Nile says, more sharply than any of them really deserve.

“There’s no plan,” Andy tells her, infinitely tired. “There’s just us.”

Nile gets off the desk. “Fine. But you all have to promise me something. When this is done, and when we all come back, we’re not sticking around here. Don’t let Copley guilt you into staying for cleanup, or tests, or whatever. We walk away.”

Nicky is the only one who nods--the only one, maybe, who believes they’re coming back. “And then we figure out what to do with Booker.”

“What to _do_ with him?”

“He killed the war, Nile. If he’d done this any earlier, we would already be extinct.”

“Good thing he didn’t,” Nile bites, and she leaves them there. 

Booker is sitting on the stoop. He scoots so she can get past, but instead, Nile sits beside him. “How’s it going?” he asks. 

Nile huffs a bitter laugh. 

“Yeah,” Booker agrees. 

He sounds like a dead man walking, like he’s already accepted the sentence they may not survive to pass on him. Does it sting to be so thoroughly replaced? Has he already come to terms with the fact that he abandoned his post and orchestrated things this way, or has he shoved all of that into a back room that he’ll unpack sometime after the apocalypse? 

“I couldn’t have done what you did today,” he says. At Nile’s look he insists, “No, I couldn’t. None of us could. We’ve followed Andy for so long. If I’d known…” Unable to finish, he drinks. 

If he had known this morning, he would have done anything to keep Andy from getting back into Roci. To keep from losing another copilot. 

“Andy came to dig me out of retirement,” Booker says instead, his eyes tracking something Nile can’t see along the far wall. “I went off on my own after Lykon died, but then she lost Quỳnh, and there was an empty Mark-3 and too many attacks happening, so she brought me back. Neither of us wanted to have anyone in our heads again, to trust like that. And our first Drift, it was awful. The neural handshake never got above eighty-five percent, but we bagged a kill that way so they still gave us Spearhead. We had to do it, so we did, but the only connection we had was our grief.” 

So he went from suffering in silence to causing suffering. Even the Drift wasn’t enough to lead Booker to where he could show someone else his pain, without dragging them into it with him. 

Maybe he had that with Lykon. Maybe he believed it died with Lykon. 

“Would you do something for me?” 

“What do you need, Book?”

From the inside pocket of his jacket he removes a dogtag with a black silencer on a short loop of ball chain. “Would you take this, when you go back out? Lykon never got to see the Breach.” 

Nile runs her thumb over the embossed letters. Somewhere deep in the Drift, like the nesting doll at the center of all the others, there must have been something of Lykon, but she wouldn’t know to recognize it. “What was he like?”

“He was the best of us,” Booker says. “Always the first to answer when someone called for help. He loved music, all kinds. It was actually very annoying, never knowing what would be stuck in his head in the Drift.” 

Booker swallows. “He dressed like an aging rock star who’d lost all relevance. Pissed off Quỳnh and Joe so bad with his fashion choices. We, ah, we used to go the bars off base, back before they shut down the Icebox. We told people we were pilots. I don’t think anyone believed us--but he still got laid.”

Nile snorts with unexpected laughter. 

“He would have adored you,” Booker says, and looks away from her. “There’s a hollow spot inside the chest plate. It won’t get in the way of the suit there.”

She nods, and puts the tag in her pocket. 

Booker caps his flask and gets up, to go sleep on Copley’s couch, or maybe on a bench in the mess hall. “You ought to--”

Red and amber lights start flashing all down the corridor. 

Nile drops her head even as she reaches up so Booker can pull her to stand. _God_ , but she’s tired. 

She ducks into her quarters to grab the circuitry suit, then uses it to bundle up the armor pieces Nicky shoves into her arms as the others emerge. Andy is already back in her underlayer. 

They follow the current of humanity until they reach the elevator to the Drivesuit Room. Nile gets in alongside Joe and Nicky. When she turns back, Andy is yards down the hall, her back to them, facing Booker. 

Nile can’t hear what they say, if they say anything at all. After a moment Booker shifts and puts his arms around Andy, his hand on the back of her head. They step back from each other. Nile breathes in deep as Andy turns to join them. 

She takes a minute, when they get into Spearhead Rocinante. They have that long at least: the kaiju still circle the Breach, protecting it or waiting. Scion’s J-Techs are strapping a nuke to their back, and Roci’s are finishing last-minute plating reinforcements. 

Nile touches the feedback cradle, the center console, the Pons unit’s Drift core. Lykon died before he and Booker had a chance to need a replacement Jaeger. Some part of him remains here, and it isn’t just the tag Nile tucked inside the shell of her armor. Maybe he heard, when she was trying to restart the Jaeger’s heart. 

It isn’t far-fetched--they are the soul in these machines and the power that drives them. For twelve years the war has been fought with human connection. Roci is going to Challenger Deep with neither of her original pilots, but instead of mechanical coldness, all Nile has felt while inside her is welcome. Accepted, completely. 

Andy left three ruined Jaegers behind her before she stepped into Roci. Nile wonders, as she prepares to go into the Drift, what Andy left of herself in each of them. 

They are still and silent on the flight out to the Guam quadrant. The Drift washes over them. Nile follows where Andy wants to look in her long past, into rooms she hasn’t seen before. Memories filled with warmth, with a family that grew, slowly, over millennia. Faces she loved, that looked to her for leadership, that followed where she led, even if it was to their deaths. 

“You’re not dead yet,” Nile reminds her. 

Andy says nothing. 

Nile’s not going to make promises, not here, no matter how much she wants to, but she’ll do whatever it takes to bring Andy back. All of them. She didn’t choose this but she is going to see it through, and then she’s going to walk with them out of that Shatterdome, and disappear. 

They seal their ports, detach from the choppers, and descend to the ocean basin. Joe curses over the comms. “LOCCENT, we’ve barely hit six thousand meters down and Scion has a Conn-Pod shielding leak. Raising cabin pressure and turning on the pumps.” They keep a direct line open with Scion for coordination, and over that Nile hears him mutter, “Wish I brought my gum.”

“I can weld that for you when we’re back up top,” Nile offers. 

“Would you?” Nicky asks. 

“Don’t go changing careers on us now, Roci. You weren’t born to weld.” Joe’s meaning makes her smile for the first time in hours, but she hopes to God there aren’t still kaiju to fight after today. 

“Visibility zero,” Andy reports. “Switching to instruments. Six hundred meters from the drop, three thousand to the Breach.” 

“Spearhead, you’ve got movement on your right--three o’clock.” Booker’s voice now, from LOCCENT. 

Andy swivels, and the Conn-Pod turns with her, but there’s nothing within a hundred feet. 

“Left now,” says Copley, “moving fast.”

Still nothing. They reach the cliff’s edge and Scion waits for them to go first. The three-kilometer jump is almost gentle by comparison to the last couple times Nile has made rapid descents. Volcanic vents glow like campfires on the shelf around them. The mouth of the Breach looms wide and orange ahead, with Scunner and Raiju, Category IVs, in the gloom on the far side. 

“Bogeys have stopped,” says Booker, so Roci stops too. “Shit. Getting a third signature from the Breach, boss. It’s… big.”

“We’ll have to call that a Category V,” Copley says quietly. “Designation Slattern.”

Out of the fires of the Breach rises a hammer-headed leviathan. Slattern floats before them, tails coiled like a helix. Nile drops her arms in unison with Andy, and their dual labryses snap to extension. 

“We see him, boss,” says Joe. “Coming around to flank, just hang--”

Static then, and expletives in several languages, but they don’t have time to check on Scion. Slattern’s tails go into a spin like he means to whip the sea into a maelstrom. He strikes at Roci’s chest and they are thrown back against the column of a vent. Sparks and saltwater shower inside the Conn-Pod. 

Nile groans and moves with Andy to get Roci standing again. Five hundred meters away, Scion has lost their right arm--they make the first kill of the day with their left, slicing Raiju down the middle even as he charges them. 

And then the display is full of nothing but Slattern, who slams into Roci and bowls them backwards for half a kilometer. Nile swings and cuts a gouge in Slattern’s neck; blue blood billows in the water. They hook both labryses under Slattern’s arms and force them up, straining, until Slattern squirms away. His arms hang by a thread. 

He opens his jaws--but they learned from Otachi. If they were a hair closer, Andy would cleave Slattern’s head off. As it is, she deepens the cut Nile made, terminates whatever Slattern was about to do, and releases a fresh cloud of Kaiju Blue. 

“Roci,” Joe calls. “We’re flooded up to our knees in here. Half our systems are down. We're still armed, but Scunner isn’t letting us get any closer.” 

“We copy, Scion. Heading your way.”

“Boss, you need to stay back. We’re gonna clear you a path.”

Andy lets out a shaky breath and shuts her eyes, and Nile understands what they’re about to do--and what she and Andy will have to do with Roci to finish the mission. 

“The payload is released,” Nicky says. “T-minus thirty seconds. Money’s on you, Rocinante.” 

“Get out of there, Scion,” says Andy, less like an order and more like a plea. “I don’t want to find out if you can survive that. 

“Copy that,” says Joe. “See you up there.”

Nile tries to track them on the HUD, to see when Scion’s escape pods eject--but Slattern comes at them again. They catch him, use his speed to roll, plant Roci’s foot against his gut, and throw him toward Scion. Then they stick one labrys in the rock shelf like a pickaxe and brace themselves. 

A miniature sun rises on the seabed. 

As the edge of it rolls over them, Roci’s Conn-Pod grows blistering hot, and then it’s past, and it takes the ocean with it. They keep hugging the floor until a solid wall of water returns to fill the void. 

The Conn-Pod is drenched in red emergency lighting as they get back up. Oxygen, fuel, coolant--it’s all jetting out of Roci, and Nile can barely read their displays for all the steam and sparks. As they lurch toward the edge of the Breach they find one cleanly filleted half of Raiju. They bring him along. 

The comms are half fried, but Booker’s voice reaches them. “--earhead, what’s your status?”

Andy growls with effort. “You’d better be right about this, Book.”

“Copy that, boss.” Booker’s relief is audible. “Tracking two pods. Vital signs are good.” 

With an impact Nile feels through Roci’s mangled legs, Slattern lands before them. Nile thinks for a wild moment that the malevolent intelligence beyond the Breach finally did it--they unraveled the secret of immortality and made a kaiju that can’t die. But she feels Andy’s beleaguered certainty in the Drift. 

A nuclear bomb can’t kill Slattern, but they can. 

“Rear jets,” Andy says in a voice gone thin with pain. They crouch and spring forward to grapple Slattern, embedding one labrys in his back. The momentum of the jets carries him and Roci together over the edge. 

One of Slattern’s tails mauls their back and shreds their reserve tanks. Nile was already laboring to breathe, but now her oxygen supply redlines and her vision dims at the edges. She holds on long enough to see Andy blast the turbine exhaust and finally, finally, Slattern stops fighting. 

If she had the energy, Nile would be furious at making it this far only to pass out at the threshold. She must be asleep at last, dreaming--all she sees now is lightning and flame. 

But she’s still in the Drift, maybe more fully than ever, without conscious thought to distract her. She doesn’t hear what Andy says to her, and only distantly feels Andy’s hand on the back of her neck. 

What she feels, overwhelmingly, is Andy’s contentment and peace. Happiness, even, that she is the one to do it this time. She feels the rightness of it. 

Then Nile feels herself rising. The tether of the Drift grows thinner and thinner until it snaps like a strand of spider silk. She is alone and bereft. 

They fixed the decompression problem--her escape pod ascends sluggishly for seven miles. It has its own oxygen supply, so when her pod surfaces Nile is awake, and crying. She floats on the still sea for a long time before a gloved hand taps her canopy. 

“Nile?” Nicky pulls the emergency release, and the canopy opens. “Hey?” 

He’s kneeling in his own pod; Joe perches on the curved upper hull. “You did it,” Joe tells her. “The Breach is closed.” 

They should all be happier about it. And yet. 

Nile sits up slowly like she’s sore, though her burns have already faded and her muscles have repaired themselves. She pulls her helmet off and sobs Andy’s name. 

A tinny voice in a speaker somewhere asks for a status update. “She’s okay,” Nicky lies. 

“We’re tracking the second pod,” Booker replies. 

Nile straightens at once, stands, turns to scan the water. She hears it burst to the surface behind her and she’s already swimming. 

Andy is unmoving inside, eyes closed. Nile gets the canopy open and reaches down to take off her helmet. Nicky’s pod bumps them gently--he used the tracking dye jets to propel it over--and he reaches to tug Andy’s glove down and feel for a pulse. Joe watches, his expression like an open wound. Nile holds her breath. 

Andy coughs, the most beautiful sound Nile has ever heard. She gathers Andy up in her arms. Nicky and Joe both drop their shoulders, lean in to rest their foreheads together. 

Andy puts her hand on the back of Nile’s neck and draws away to look at her. She rallies a smile, warm and genuine, but the loss in her eyes is fathomless. 

Over the comms Copley says, “Rangers, we have your position. Choppers are inbound.”

They could just… not get on the choppers. They could float wherever the currents take them until they wash up on a beach. They could stay hidden until no one who would look for them is left alive. They have earned that rest, and then some. 

But even without the Drift, Nile knows what the others would say. They won’t leave Booker at the mercy of whatever the PPDC will turn into now. 

And anyway, Nile’s jacket is still in the Shatterdome, and she needs to add a kill marker. 

So Nile holds Andy closer and turns her face toward the sun and waits for the thunder of rotors. She thinks about calling her mother, as soon as she’s outside of the ‘Dome. Jay, too, to tell her what a weird couple of days it's been.

She thinks, for the first time since before she went to work on the Wall, about what she might do with her life. She thinks it’s going to involve cleaning beaches, and housing construction, and maybe, as a hobby, robotics. 

Andy jolts in her arms at the sound of another pod surfacing. Nile opens her eyes. She must be dreaming. 

The pod bleeds red tracking dye into the ocean. Its hull is scorched and pitted, but still watertight. The innocent way it bobs there, a gift years overdue, is at odds with the dread Nile feels as its canopy begins to hinge open. 

It is labeled Viper Fury.

**Author's Note:**

> Cheers for reading! I’m on Tumblr @hauntedfalcon if you want to come yell with me about The Old Guard, or Pacific Rim for that matter. 
> 
> Massive thanks to @commander-diomika for beta reading.


End file.
